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Croatia's Relations with the United Kingdom from Independence to Brexit

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Croatia's Relations with the United Kingdom from Independence to Brexit CIRR XXIII (79) 2017, 5-39 ISSN 1848-5782 UDC 327(497.5:41-4) Vol.XVIII, No. 66 - 2012 Vol.XVIII, DOI 10.1515/cirr-2017-0013 XXIII (79) - 2017 Struggling for the Future, Burdened by the Past: Croatia’s Relations with the United Kingdom from Independence to Brexit Josip Glaurdić Abstract Apart from relations with its neighbours, Croatia’s relations with the United Kingdom (UK) were undoubtedly its greatest international challenge since it won its independence in the early 1990s. Relations between the two countries during this period were frequently strained partly due to Zagreb’s democratic shortcomings, but partly also due to competing visions of post-Cold War Southeast Europe and due to long-lasting biases rooted in Croatia’s and Britain’s conflicting policies during Yugoslavia’s breakup and wars. Croatia’s accession to the EU in 2013 offered an opportunity for the two countries to leave the burdens of their past behind, since Zagreb and London had similar preferences on a number of crucial EU policy fronts. However, Brexit changed everything. Croatia’s future relations with the UK are likely to be determined by the nature of Brexit negotiations and the evolution of British policy toward the pace and direction of EU integration. KEY WORDS: Croatia, United Kingdom, foreign relations, European Union 5 The contrast between Croatia’s standing in the international system today and its position in January 1992, when it was finally recognised by the Vol.XVIII, No. 66 - 2012 Vol.XVIII, member states of the European Community, could not be starker. Two and a half decades ago Croatia won its independence after barely surviving XXIII (79) - 2017 a brutal war that left thousands of its citizens dead, several hundred thousand homeless, and a third of its territory under occupation. Although internationally recognised, its territorial integrity was far from secured. Moreover, its relations with most European and world powers – partly on account of its pursuit of independence, and partly on account of these powers’ policies during the war – were troublingly acrimonious. Twenty- five years ago, Croatia was attempting to ride the wave of international system changes in order to extricate itself from a troublesome regional status quo. Today, in the midst of a new round of tectonic shifts in the international system, Croatia is hardly keen to alter the regional or larger European status quo. It is a country at peace with its neighbours (despite frequent, though comparatively minor, tensions), desperate to maintain the protection it receives through the membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and European Union (EU). Over the course of the same two and a half decades, the United Kingdom (UK) went through a completely opposite transformation of its standing in the international system. At the time of the end of the Cold War, Britain was engaged in a profound debate regarding its foreign policy strategy and the shift in its geopolitical position. The end of the Soviet threat, the reunification of Germany, and the process of deepening of European integration left Britain’s political class torn over the redefinition of Britain’s international priorities. Was Britain supposed to jump behind the steering wheel of European integration – to be “at the heart of Europe”, as the newly installed Prime Minister John Major exclaimed in November 1990 (Smith, G. 1992: 155) – or was it to remain on its side-lines? What role was Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States (US) to play in its positioning in the budding EU? Considering the change in America’s perception of Europe and the geopolitical transformation of the continent, was Britain on the verge of losing to a reunited Germany the position of the “pivot of the West” and a bridge between the US and Europe, and instead turning into “England under Henry VIII: a kingdom on the edge of a European system, attempting both to play a part in continental politics and to assert its independence of continental constraints” (Wallace 1992: 424)? 6 Although the British political class welcomed these questions with trepidation, a new status quo in Europe – that was highly beneficial to the UK – developed rather quickly. London was at the forefront of shaping No. 66 - 2012 Vol.XVIII, new European political and security structures, all the while building on its special relationship with Washington, and maintaining its connections XXIII (79) - 2017 throughout its former Empire (Jović 2007). Then, however, came Brexit. Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, Sir Percy Cradock, thought that one of the greatest errors of modern British foreign policy was treating Europe “[not] as if it was truly our future, rather as if it was a threat, or an adversary” (Cradock 1997: 207). That error, simmering on and under the surface of British politics for five decades, materialised in the summer of 2016 into a de facto capture of the ruling Conservative Party by its Eurosceptic wing and the consequent departure of the UK from the EU after a bitterly fought and extremely divisive referendum campaign. From one of the pillars of European political and economic security, Britain suddenly turned into one of the largest threats to Europe’s geopolitical status quo. The role reversal between Britain and Croatia, if one compares their positions toward Europe’s present and future, was complete. Such a clear disparity in the direction and nature of change in the international positions of Croatia and Britain over the past twenty-five years, coupled with Britain’s traditionally low interest in Eastern Europe, could lead us to conclude that relations between the two countries during this period were at best inconsequential. The obvious disproportion in their power capabilities may also lead us to conclude that their relations could only have been unidirectional: that is, Croatia could only have been an object of British foreign policy, never a truly independent subject in the interaction between the two countries, no matter the obvious power imbalance. Both of those conclusions, however, would be incorrect. The story of relations between Croatia and Britain is by no means a thin volume depicting the powerless simply adjusting to the wishes of the powerful. In the two and a half decades of its independence, Croatia faced many foreign policy challenges: from securing its territorial integrity to establishing functional relations with its neighbours and positioning itself firmly within the political, economic, and security structures of the EU and NATO. Arguably no other country outside of Southeast Europe (SEE) created more obstacles for Croatia in the completion of those foreign 7 policy challenges than Britain. Considering the extraordinary changes in Europe’s political architecture that we are currently witnessing, it is Vol.XVIII, No. 66 - 2012 Vol.XVIII, time to take stock of the evolution of the relations between these two countries. This article traces Croatia’s relations with the UK from its struggle XXIII (79) - 2017 for independence in the early 1990s until the present day, with particular attention devoted to the one intervening variable without which those relations could not be properly understood: the European Union. The article does that in the hope of better understanding the future of not only relations between these two countries, but also of the European project and the UK’s policies toward its continued development. The “original sin”: Britain, Croatia and the breakup of Yugoslavia Britain’s policy toward the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, later labelled by Brendan Simms (2002) as Britain’s “unfinest hour”, was founded upon two closely related dynamics from the late 1980s: 1) London’s devotion to the continuing existence of the Yugoslav federation, and 2) the consequent blind spot for the campaign of Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia for control over a recentralized Yugoslavia. The response of the Foreign Office to Ambassador Peter Hall’s distressed 1989 and 1990 reports about the harmful consequences of Milošević’s campaign was that “they really would much prefer it not to be happening” and that Yugoslavia simply had to remain united (Hall 2005). This position of the Foreign Office was in no way exceptional. During this period, all Western powers – including (West) Germany which did not deviate from the mainstream until real war began in the summer of 1991 – strongly believed not only that the Yugoslav republics had to stick together, but also that they would politically and economically benefit from steady centralisation. This policy preference essentially implied that the Western powers supported Milošević and not Yugoslavia’s northwest republics in the constitutional debates which consumed the federation’s political landscape in the years leading up to war. It also matched the West’s larger policy preference regarding the preservation of stability in Eastern Europe. As the Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd later put it, “We had no strategic interest in the Balkans, no 8 commercial interest, no selfish interest at all. We simply wished that quiet should return” (Hurd 2005). Vol.XVIII, No. 66 - 2012 Vol.XVIII, Hurd’s image of Britain simply wishing for “quiet” to return to a region in which it had no particular strategic interests is, of course, only one part XXIII (79) - 2017 of the story. The larger and by far the more interesting part was Britain’s strong policy activism in pursuit of that “quiet” once real war came to Slovenia and
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